This is obviously a less than perfect solution since now this artifact of UI - Uyghur is with us, with not muh more than some blogs of mine to explain why. But changing the ISO-639 code is a huge problem for a lot of people affecting a lot more areas than just this one, and changing the mechanism the Language Bar uses to represent languages would also have much wider impact than fixing this one case.

But we learn to live with issues like DE - German and ES - Spanish and EL - Greek and more recenty FA - Persian. So it is not like this is without precedent (for the record the first 3 of those four examples are due to native name spelling and the fourth is an issue similar in many ways to the Uyghur one).

And the German one can help make a funny joke in presentations when there are Germans in the room. :-)

It is really just people like Thomas Milo and I who seem to express unhappiness about issues like this one. Sigh...

John Hudson on 26 Feb 2010 8:15 PM:

I was amused, when researching Uyghur typography a couple of years ago, to find both spellings used in a single book by a single author.

Michael S. Kaplan on 27 Feb 2010 11:42 AM:

Probably using different sources and not copy-editing enough. :-)

Jan Kučera on 28 Feb 2010 4:33 PM:

Edit: Reading again I see you have written you asked for both of them, but I will post this anyway: I am quite annoyed how Windows 7 decides which keybord layouts to install instead of installing what user selected (I don't think the previous Windows versions did it).

For example if I choosed Czech (QWERTY) layout even during the very first Windows installation, it comes up with both Czech and Czech (QWERTY), Czech set to default of course.

Oh and then comes this super crazy United States-International, which I think is installed if your installation choice is an US keyboard yet different locale.

I would be quite interested how such "breaking" changes can be commited or thought out at all! Or am I the one who is broken? :)

Michael S. Kaplan on 3 Mar 2010 5:27 PM:

The Netherlands locale includes the US International keyboard by request of the subsidiary; in Windows 7 the Uyghur locale only inclues the new one (except on upgrade when the old was selected since they never take out one that is there already)....

John Cowan on 8 Mar 2011 8:54 AM:

Except that the ISO 639-1 code for Uyghur is ug, not ui!

Michael S. Kaplan on 8 Mar 2011 10:36 AM:

The langbar is the truncated three-letter code, not the two-letter code -- as the blogs I link to mention....